About the so-called apartheid situation: this has been said before, notably by Trevor Phillips in 2006 (see earlier entry). Darcus Howe responded to it in the New Statesman at the time, with reference to the supposedly segregated London suburb of Norbury (!):

This community, I warned the attentive audience, was not sleepwalking. The evidence indicates the opposite: a dynamic section of the population which has painstakingly reconstituted a high street on its last legs into a vibrant, multicultural place. To describe us as segregated borders on abuse. All are free to come and go. There is always a coming and a going as communities change to accommodate the new.

I have travelled through the Deep South in America and I know what segregation is. Its defining characteristic is that it is always organised and perpetuated by a racist state power. So, too, in South Africa.

I joined the passengers who cram the trains to Victoria, cheek by jowl. Whites are huddled next to blacks. Asians are crushed up against Africans. And when they arrive at work Muslims and Christians are set in motion beside each other; they join trade unions together and discuss the latest fashions together.

I would have thought that anyone who would compare London to South Africa (or the Jim Crow-era Deep South) would never have experienced the real thing, but clearly David Levin did, but the use of “apartheid” to refer to communities sticking to their own kind, to a certain extent, smacks of cheap and alarmist political posturing. Although parts of Tower Hamlets are indeed dominated by certain ethnic minorities (Bengalis and Somalis, for example), Peckham is a very mixed area (although the estates of North Peckham are less so, and more impoverished), but even so, that part of Tower Hamlets that is most dominated by those minorities is one of the areas that was not hit by the rioting in August, so they must be doing something right. Very large parts of the country hardly see a brown face in years, while people are free to pass through Whitechapel and Stepney, go to college there, shop at the market and, if they so choose, live there, regardless of their race or religion. Perhaps someone who isn’t Bengali and/or Muslim would feel less comfortable, but I expect the local people would not feel very comfortable in one of the hundreds of thousands of mostly-white suburbs and English villages. Mr Levin’s own school is in some sense a ghetto, offering its services only to those whose parents can pay the fees (i.e. the rich), with a small number of scholarships, perhaps. I’m sure he does not employ police with water cannons or billy-clubs, or a secret police, or lynch mobs to keep the hoi polloi out, and neither do you find these things in the suburbs were large numbers of ethnic minorities live. That’s what distinguishes segregation or Apartheid.

Chris Woodhead, in his interview on BBC London this morning, did not address the inappropriate use of the term “apartheid” but disagreed with Levin’s claims, and opposed bussing children from one suburb to another so as to artificially produce a mixed environment, and suggested that people often feel more comfortable with many of those of their religion or culture, rather than being the only one among a sea of others.

Earlier this week, he said in an interview with the Times (which is paywalled, but there is a synposes at BBC News) in which he suggested cutting the school leaving age to 14 and opposed the government’s scheme in which independent schools sponsored academies. As far as the school leaving age goes, this is something I have said here before: keeping youths who are not interested in learning in formal education up to 16 makes schools less productive for everyone, because many of these pupils will simply disrupt others’ learning. Over the past couple of generations, more and more young people have stayed in education for longer, increasingly by necessity as qualifications that relatively few people received in the past are now standard. At the same time, vocational qualifications and apprenticeships have become fewer and further between. Those of us who stayed on into further education in the past remember sixth form and university as the best part of our education, largely because we were surrounded by people who wanted to be there and were interested in what was being taught. It may also be beneficial to a school environment that there not be too many older (and bigger and physically more adult) pupils who are less interested in learning, and more inclined to cause trouble.

The problem is that there needs to be opportunities for the early leavers, so perhaps trade schools could be set up for pupils who have a firm idea of what trade they want to go into at that age, and they could also form partnerships with major employers. The state should also, however, invest in adult education so that those who were not inclined to learn while in adolescence, or whose home or school environment did not permit it, could complete their education later — again, in the company of those who choose to be there rather than being forced.

Where I cannot possibly agree is his suggestion that it is “morally wrong” for independent schools to be called on to support academies, because the teachers’ time would be taken away from attending to the children of the fee-payers. Private schools are mostly bastions of privilege (and those that are not, like the handful of shoestring religious schools, are unlikely to be involved in this). Schools are places where children are set up for the adult world and have the opportunity to work for qualifications that they will need in adult life. While I question the motivation of having such a scheme only for academies, and not for mainstream comprehensives (i.e. it gives the academies a prestige that other state schools lack), it is only right that private schools, which have charitable status and the favourable tax regime that entails, should be expected to provide services to the community rather than simply to fee paying customers, and that those who got lucky should not be able to isolate themselves and their children in a bubble of privilege when they have, most likely, benefited from public services (often including education) themselves in the past.

Recently a secondary school in Ipswich (the third in the town) changed its uniform code making trousers compulsory for all pupils, boys and girls. This is because girls had been appearing in ever-shorter skirts, leading to teachers having to send some girls home and wasting a lot of time that could have been spent on other things. The justification when the first school changed the rules (Kesgrave High) was that girls were cycling to school in very short skirts, and the headteacher was quoted as saying that they do not want girls having a “come-hither look”. While bans have not happened across the country, over the last 20 years trousers have become acceptable dress for girls in schools where there are uniforms, and in 2005 girls’ school trousers outsold skirts at Woolworths for the first time. (In 2002, only 2% of girls’ “bottoms” sold by Woolworths were trousers.) Needless to say, the same measure cannot be used for the popularity of skirts or trousers this year.

The article also features a teacher’s view, which favours abolishing uniforms altogether. It is difficult for male teachers to reprimand girls for wearing inappropriate clothes, often leading to retorts that they “shouldn’t be looking” and being called perverts. Requiring girls to wear trousers “blurs gender”, he says, causing embarrassment for girls with no bust, and encourages “ladette culture”:

One of the benefits of co-education is the opportunity for the genders to learn from each other, for boorish thugs to feminise, for eyelash-flutterers to masculate. I saw no skirt-wearers kicking in shop windows this summer.

The subject interests me because I am firmly on the side of abolition, with some dress code implemented to make sure pupils attend in clothing which is at least appropriate. Many of the arguments in favour are easily countered; the argument that it masks social inequality, for example, is proven to be a lie when children can find out where others live, or gauge their class by the way they talk. Some argue that it instils pride or a school identity, but what is there to be proud of? Children have to go to school (except for those who are home-schooled or too ill, and neither of those are the children’s choice) and there are only so many schools and they have to go to one of them. They might not want their school to be part of their identity either — they may already have a family or a religious community for that. Workplaces have uniforms, usually for public-facing workers so that they can be easily identified; there is no reason for the same to apply to a school. Being identifable to pupils of other schools might actually be dangerous.

The article also refers to a boy who wore a skirt to school earlier this year in protest against the schools’ refusal to allow boys to wear shorts, while they allowed girls to wear knee-length skirts in the summer months, seen as discrimination because girls had a more comfortable option in the heat. This is not the first time someone has done this — a boy wore a skirt to school in 2006 for similar reasons — and in both cases the school did not object but, to my knowledge, did not change the rules. Personally, I do not find long trousers particularly uncomfortable in terms of heat (I wear them every day and have done for years); what I did find dreadfully uncomfortable were top buttons and ties, and it caused one run-in with teachers and prefects after another. I am still reluctant to wear them, regardless of the occasion. I know they are associated with power to some people, but to me it is quite the opposite and that sort of power has always been rather remote from my perspective in any case.

As for the issue of short skirts, surely they could avoid this problem by allowing girls to wear either long skirts or long trousers, like the boys, and if a girl chooses to wear a skirt and turns up in one that is too short, she gets given a pair of trousers to wear. This way, there is no perception of discrimination and if some girls see wearing a skirt as essential to distinguishing them as girls, they can (although some parents may also see skirts as proper school clothes, even if the school offers a choice), and boys might not decide to wear skirts whether for comfort or as a protest (although I don’t think there is any harm in it, particularly for junior boys — they would look much more out of place on a boy who was physically adult).

However, I believe schools are allowed too much leeway with uniforms; there are still state schools which require pupils (or rather, their parents) to purchase expensive bespoke uniforms such as kilt-type skirts with a particular pattern for girls and blazers for both sexes (Catholic schools seem to be the worst offenders here). State schools are meant to be a public service and should not require additional expense as they are already paid for out of the public purse. I should add that in some developing countries which are former British colonies, school uniforms are required in state schools which results in some children being unable to attend as their parents cannot afford it; a particularly harmful colonial legacy. There should at most be a requirement for appropriate clothing, so as to take into account religious requirements, some children’s physical sensitivities and to make sure the clothing is not uncomfortable, ridiculous or demeaning. After all, if outlandish clothing can be a distraction from the school’s learning purpose, the same can be said for struggles with uncomfortable clothes and jobsworth teachers who insist on defending it.

Boris Johnson has called for school children involved in the riots last week (and presumably any future similar incidents) to be removed from their school places and placed in pupil referral units (PRUs). The above article reads:

At present, only headteachers can order a child to be removed from their school and moved to a PRU.

In a letter sent to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, Mr Johnson said: “Depriving the offender of their customary school place is something which would hit home.

“It would isolate them from their peer group during the school day, preventing bragging rights on school premises, and sends a salutary warning to other pupils that such behaviour will result in temporary ejection from the school community.

“Referring them to a PRU puts them in a unit where teachers are already skilled in addressing unacceptable behaviour but at the same time ensures that their education is continued.”

PRUs have been dubbed “21st century borstals” and host children expelled from school. There are about 420 across England and teachers can opt out of the National Curriculum.

My aunt used to run a PRU and I spent quite a bit of my time at primary school in it for my own educational reasons, as well as being a regular visitor, so I know a bit about them. They are not there to hold children as a punishment. They are there to offer some kind of education for children who, for one reason or another, cannot stay in a normal school. They include some children who are excluded for being disrupted, or who have statements of special educational needs (SEN) who are difficult to place. They also include some children who are ill (my aunt told me there had been a teenage girl with ME in her unit at one point).

It is not only headteachers who can send children to a PRU; the decision is taken by the education department. The reason children cannot be sentenced to them is because they are not part of the criminal justice system and are not meant to be. They are generally small, both in terms of class size and classroom size — my aunt’s had, as I recall, six or seven small classrooms (and a gym) which catered to pupils from the whole school age range (some have fewer — the PRU in Scarborough has only four teaching rooms). If every schoolchild who had been in any way involved in the riots last week were moved to the local PRU, it would be overwhelmed. Not all their pupils are delinquent or violent, or are involved in gangs, and some would be harmed by exposure to such people, as with anyone of a fragile disposition (such as that girl with ME).

Of course, the effect of enforced removal from school to an ill-equipped unit would doubtless have a disastrous effect on the education of those removed, particularly if they had been studying for GCSEs at the time, which might not be a good idea if we want to keep them away from a life of crime in the future. This proposal would be disastrous for everyone it would affect if it came into force and one would hope it will be treated with the contempt it deserves. It’s a wholly ill-informed, ridiculous idea.

Picture taken from the Scarborough Pupil Referral Unit website.

The above article appears on a website mainly aimed at the African American community and I got the link from a Black American Muslim friend on Facebook. It tells how the author was initially disappointed when she found that the child she was carrying was a boy, not having considered that it might be, but is now glad she has a boy because “raising girls seems to be so much more difficult and complicated than raising boys”:

Raising a confident, respectful, intelligent, happy child is definitely not easy and we all know the challenges young Black boys face in America. Black boys are overwhelming pushed into Special Education classes whenever they show the first signs of hyperactivity, they are not always given the space to be emotional and express themselves, and they are often held to hyper-masculine standards of manhood. While the challenges of raising Black boys are many, raising girls, especially Black girls, requires a different set of skills and the ability to not only guard against racism, but also brace against a society that is working overtime to sexualize little girls.

These days, when I’m shopping for my son, I’m reminded, again, of why I’m thankful my child is a boy. The girl’s clothing section is still filled with frilly pink dresses, but over the years I’ve noticed that most of the clothes have become far more sexual. From pink miniskirts to flowered halter-tops, the girl’s clothing sections looks like most of its outfits are just miniature versions of the junior’s sections.

The complaints include padded bikini tops for girls aged 7 to 14 (that is actually a very wide age range which includes little girls and girls who are almost adult, and does not actually mean that any are being sold for 7-year-olds). I have read reports that the claims about this kind of product in the UK are exaggerated; in one case involving an alleged “padded swimsuit” for girls under ten, according to the Associated Press, “a source familiar with the product said the extra fabric was designed to preserve a girl’s modesty and prevent any signs of a developing breast from showing through”. Still, there is some truth to what this writer is saying, although (at least here in the UK) it is not only Black girls who are affected.

The problem is that nobody seems to consider two key reasons why this process has been able to go unchecked for so long. The first is that current political culture and, in the USA, the law, makes it impossible to pass legislation that would curb the kind of music, videos and printed material that promote sexualisation. The fact that it could not be enforced in the USA would discourage politicians elsewhere from even trying, because we could not stem the flow of junk from the USA, particularly over the Internet. On top of this, there would be the usual flow of complaints about “prudery” and censorship, regardless of whether it was done on conservative or feminist grounds. We would need both politicians and judges willing to accept that there is a problem, and do what is needed to tackle it, and I don’t see that happening.

Another is that, when people bemoan the sexualised clothing of girls, they forget that the girls are only copying adult women, and if adult women dress in an obviously sexualised way then girls will want to as well. If we get disturbed when children “dress like little adults”, we need to consider how adults dress, which in the case of women these days often reveals copious amounts of flesh — much more, it has to be said, than most men reveal in the same situations (such as office work). It’s true that we see a lot of men with their trousers down, revealing their underwear, but there are a lot of very revealing styles of dress for women that are considered respectable and suitable for working with the public or with children. In days gone by, it would have been a compliment for a child to be described as particularly mature for their years, or at worst it meant that they were stuck-up or too serious, but nowadays, said of a girl, it means she simply shows too much of her body. What is needed is the de-sexualisation of the public sphere in general.

Adults often forget that childhood is not the romantic fantasy they often project onto it. The article in Clutch magazine claims that girlhood used to mean “playing with dolls, braiding each other’s hair, and jumping double-dutch”, but for many children it is characterised by boredom, disempowerment, exclusion and bullying by both adults and other children, and this was the case when that author was growing up as well as now. Children look up to adults and do not envisage themselves as being children for the long haul, they look up to adults and copy them, and often want to be adults (as I did), so it is unrealistic to expect children to wear clothes which are distinctive from adults’ and which mark them as children and therefore as less-than. Adults need to set an example, not moan about how nine-year-old girls dress while dressing like the kind of adult one really does not want them to grow into.

Francesca Montoya, known as Cesca, was the Spanish teacher, and was approached by sixth-former Jonah Kirby, whose father was something of a disciplinarian who distrusts schools anyway and had attempted to home-school them before being persuaded to enrol Jonah and his younger sister Ruth. Cesca initially rebuffed Jonah’s advances, but eventually they fell in love and slept together at Cesca’s house, resulting in her becoming pregnant. She nearly aborted their baby, but decided she could not go through with it, and they resolved to get married. Unfortunately for them, various pupils became aware of the situation, and when she was rushed to hospital towards the end of the last episode, Jonah rushed to be at her side. They were discovered together by Mr Mead (who had, earlier in the series, been sleeping with the head-teacher’s daughter) and taken back to see said headteacher, who called both Jonah’s father (who dragged him out of the building) and the police, who arrested Montoya, who was charged, and bailed on the condition she does not see Jonah. However, they elope, Mead follows them and calls the police again, and although they have time to marry, Montoya is re-arrested in her wedding dress as soon as the ceremony is done.

As ever, there are a few absurdities in the storyline. Someone of Spanish origin would be called Francisca, not Francesca (that’s Italian). If a parent really dragged a pupil away as violently as Jonah’s dad did in the last-but-one episode, in front of several members of staff, the school really would have to intervene, yet they did not. While Gretna Green (and other Scottish registry offices) do conduct marriages for under-18s without their parents’ permission, they do require birth certificates or passports as proof of nationality; they did not do that here. And I cannot see the police coming as mob-handed as they did in last night’s episode to arrest one person and escort another home, neither of whom were believed to be armed.

For anyone wondering why this was illegal, and not just a matter of in-school discipline, the age of consent when one party is a pupil and the other is a teacher is 18, not 16. This was introduced in the 2000 Sexual Offences Act as a compromise to allow the age of consent for gay males to be reduced to 16; the argument had been that, if such acts were legal at 16, boys that age would be vulnerable to predation by older men. (The same is true in Canada, under legislation introduced in 2008.)

There have been a couple of news stories about this in the past few weeks. The most recent was this week and involved an assistant head-teacher who styled himself the “Salford Stallion”, who was sleeping with two girls without each other knowing, and his behaviour was discovered when one of the girls arrived at his flat to find it “festooned with rose petals, balloons and bondage equipment intended for the other girl”. He also admitted making indecent images of children (by videoing his sexual acts with the girls); the acts took place in his office at the school, in the sports hall, in a pub car park, and on school trips. He was jailed for six years in total. The other was a female teaching assistant named Leah Davies, who got a 12-month suspended sentence and a two-year supervision order for sleeping with a 15-year-old boy who was said to have been a gregarious young man who initiated the act and was certainly not a victim. None of the reports mention that she was told to sign the Sex Offenders’ Register (they do not regarding Christopher Drake either, but his offences were much more serious, as reflected in his jail term; still, news reports normally mention that someone has been required to register).

After an earlier case in which a young female music teacher was jailed for carrying on an affair with a female pupil, aged 15 at the outset, the teacher and author Francis Gilbert wrote an article for the Daily Mail in which he suggested that such behaviour was much more common than might be imagined, giving the example of a man who was given to sexually harassing girl pupils at the school where they both worked, and was suspected of taking pupils home and taking “inappropriate” pictures of them, though this was never proved. The man got away with it because he was foreign, and the school refused to investigate, putting his behaviour down to “cultural differences”. This is, of course, ridiculous: such behaviour is not normal in any culture. He also denounced what he called “the weak, reckless, selfish irresponsible teachers who allow themselves to enter into what they pathetically describe as ‘romantic’ relationships with pupils”, in other words, the real-life Montoyas.

I think we can distinguish between the genuine exploiters and outright sleaze-bags, such as Christopher Drake, and those who have relationships with the pupils out of school time where there is genuine affection on both sides. Quite simply, there is no victim in a lot of these cases besides the angered parent and embarrassed head-teacher. The case of Montoya and Kirby is fiction, but I fail to see why it should merit a prison sentence when she initially resisted, refused to abort the baby, when she could have saved her own skin by crying rape, when she had tried to save face for everyone concerned by leaving suddenly, and when both parties were clearly committed to each other. Perhaps I am reading too much into it; this particular case is, after all, only fiction, but the mitigating factors are so considerable that it should be unthinkable to lock her up. The maximum sentence for assisting a suicide, for example, is 14 years, but almost nobody ever gets it and, where there are extreme circumstances, people get non-custodial sentences or are not prosecuted. And that’s where lives are lost, not gained.

It’s also been asked why female sex offenders are generally treated more leniently than male ones, particularly when the “victim” is male. The simple answer is that a woman is less able to coerce a physically mature teenage boy to have sex, and that the social consequences for him are likely to be less serious — he is more likely to be called a “ladies’ man” or a “Casanova”, while the girl is more likely to be called a slut. Having had more experience with teenage boys than I really cared to, I find it rather amusing that anyone thinks a (healthy and able-bodied) mid-teenage boy is in any need of protection from women. Many (though not all) boys that age would regard such an encounter as a conquest, a “score”. They would not feel violated or used by the experience. They are often at the top of the pile within their school community, and there are likely to be a number of children in the school who are in more need of protection from them than they are from any 20-something woman — and quite possibly aren’t getting it. I certainly didn’t.

There are, of course, circumstances where this type of behaviour simply shouldn’t be tolerated; one is where the teacher was there to counsel a pupil who was in an emotionally vulnerable state, as was the case with one of Drake’s victims. We do not allow doctors to conduct sexual relationships with their patients, even when they are adults, and there is a case to be made for banning any sexual activity between students and teachers on the grounds of academic integrity, such as eliminating the possibility of favouritism and coercion. But this should be a matter of institutional discipline, not criminal law. Sixth formers are at school or college voluntarily and (unless the government decides to raise the school leaving age) can leave any time and get a job, and can come and go as they please from the school or college as long as they attend their lessons, so it makes no sense that their tutors (whose professional relationship with them is much looser, and whose time spent with them is much less, than that of teachers of secondary-age pupils) are expected to treat them as children in that one regard. Tutors are not in the same position of power over a sixth-form student as a correctional or health worker is over an inmate or a patient, and the employers the young people might otherwise work for are not under any of these restrictions, despite having the power to terminate their livelihood.

This does not mean I would expect schools to approve of teachers carrying on with sixth-formers, but neither should we use the full force of the law on what are essentially victimless crimes. Unless there is evidence of coercion, trickery like Drake’s or a history of inappropriate behaviour that is revealed when the scandal comes to light, a first offence of this type should result in nothing more than dismissal for that teacher, and certainly no suggestion of prison or the sex offenders’ register. That ought to be reserved for those who really are a danger to the public, which cannot be said about some of the people involved in these incidents.

My biggest criticism of the programme was that it focussed too heavily on the time when Neil Morrissey himself was in care, that is to say, the mid to late 1970s (with some attention to the early 1980s as well). That was a time when a lot of the old “children’s villages” were still in existence, when whole streets were given over to children’s homes, and when a lot of the worst scandals happened; but it’s not the whole story and some of the same problems highlighted still existed when I had my experience of institutional “care” from 1989 to 1993. The extreme abuse which took place at the “home” where Morrissey’s older brother was incarcerated (as it was a secure unit) had no parallel at my school, but the problem of totally unsuitable staff who clearly did not like children (I’ve long said they appeared to have been recruited down the pub) was obvious. Some boys from another special boarding school, Berrow Wood in Worcestershire, have posted comments on previous entries here, and their stories are much more distressing than most of what went on at my school. (Some of them tried suing the councils that sent them there, but lost their case as the councils were not deemed responsible for what happened to the children in their care at private boarding schools.)

He interviewed a number of people, all roughly the same age as himself, who had been in care homes in Staffordshire at the time; there were two women who had asked to be taken into care because they were always seeing their father beat their mother, to the point where their older brother attacked their father with an axe, but two men who were in the Riverside secure unit told Morrissey some very distressing tales of sexual abuse and isolation (known as “pin down”, in which children were locked in rooms for hours or days on their own).

Towards the end of the programme, he got to meet the social worker whose name had come up time and again in his files, and played a major part in the decision to put the Morrisseys into care in the first place. Neil Morrissey seemed very upset by the fact that he and his brother were taken away from their family and separated for years for what seemed like trivial offences (in particular, repeated petty theft), and said that only “cruel bastards” would do such a thing. His files said that he seemed to have no moral standards, and the family today clearly regarded their thieving as basically nothing. However, the social worker explained that he and his team had tried desperately to try and keep the family together, but could not work with his parents, as they were never able to supervise the children due to their shift work, and neither of them accepted that keeping a clean house was their job, and ultimately, the boys had to be taken away as the environment was damaging to them.

However, Neil Morrissey seems to have been mollified somewhat by his explanation, perhaps because he ended up in a relatively benign home, even though others were being abused in the same street that he lived in. His brother was sent to a place where boys were being raped and shut up alone for days, and whatever mischief they were getting up to at home and whatever danger they were in, they were not sexually assaulting anyone, as far as can be told, or being raped, or suffering other serious cruelty. Perhaps that was not this particular social worker’s own fault, but the question was not even put to him and should have been, in my opinion.

Next week, the programme deals with the situation facing care leavers (part of Neil Morrissey’s own story is in the Society Guardian link above), who face notorious difficulty as their “care” tails off very quickly when they reach adulthood, which is usually not the case for children raised by their own families these days.

This story is about an incident in which two supply teachers decided to show a film called The Middle Passage, about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to a group of fourth graders (minimum age: 9). Three parents complained to the school board as their children were distressed by the content, which included references to suicide (and of the decapitation of their bodies) and rape. The author contends that “a Black parent cannot afford to wait to teach their child about racism, because their innocence will not protect them against those that are determined to either see them fail, or have them grow with an understanding that they are less than human”.

As a child I learned about the slave trade; I did learn about it in school but I got most of my knowledge about the subject from a children’s book entitled “The Slave Trade”, which had the stuff about people being kept chained up in the hold (complete with the top-down diagram) but left out the rape stuff, because presumably the authors thought their audience didn’t know about that kind of thing, and perhaps their parents wouldn’t want them mentioning it to their kids before they had, or before they were sure they were quite able to handle it. If they had, the book would have been unlikely to end up in a school library.

Renee alleges that “unlike White children, childhood is short lived for children of colour. Before their 10th birthday, it is almost assured that a racial act will occur that will burst the precious bubble of innocence”. So, because a child of colour is likely to experience “a racial act”, which is very unlikely to be rape, or anything else as serious as what is depicted in The Middle Passage, a parent has no right to object when material that is not age-appropriate, in his opinion, but has a racial subject (and not one that resembles anything that is happening to anyone today), is shown to his child without any prior discussion. (As if nothing might happen to a white child that might force them to grow up quicker than might have been expected.) True, the children in this school live a relatively sheltered lives (the place where it happened - Winnetka, Illinois, is one of the wealthiest communities in the USA with a median household income of over $160,000) but that still does not mean the families have no right to object to their pre-teen children being shown this kind of material.

A commenter called Katie Mariie alleged that the father’s concern to protect his daughter from stories about rape showed him to be “naive and privileged” because the “‘safety tips’ of rape culture are taught to girls as soon as they can walk. Adults might think they’re clever by masking it in phrases like ‘stranger danger’ and ‘someone might grab you,’ but little girls get the message that sexual violence is a constant threat”. I was actually taught about “stranger danger” as a child in infant school myself — the girls and boys watched the video together — but although the video we watched, from an adult perspective, clearly gave the message that the girl could have been raped (and perhaps if it was shown to older children, that is the message they would have got), the message of not talking to or taking sweets from strangers was given to girls and boys alike, because all children are at risk. And they certainly didn’t use the word ‘rape’. All we needed to know is that we could “go missing” and that something awful could happen to us.

The problem with this incident was that the video was shown without any discussion with the parents by a supply teacher who either was on a mission of his or her own, or was just stuck for something to do, or did not consider the audience and whether it was appropriate. It had not been approved by the school board and presumably had not been discussed with the school staff or the parents either; as this report notes, it was shown by the supply teachers at the direction of one permanent teacher, while the latter was elsewhere in the district. As was mentioned in the comments, some of the children could already have suffered abuse, something the teachers apparently did not consider. There are so many ways children can learn about the slave trade, but there is a lot that children have to learn (about things that are happening today) but we find appropriate ways to teach them when they are that age.

Lately I’ve seen a few stories about parents receiving cautions or fines for “child neglect” which consisted of leaving a young child in the company of an older one (as in, a teenager) for what was reported as short trips to the local shops. In the most recent case, the mother was away for 30 minutes which passed off without incident; in an earlier one, which I found reproduced on Samizdata but which originally appeared in the Nursing Times, two nurses in separate cases won appeals (brought by the Royal College of Nursing) against being disqualified from nursing after being cautioned for similar acts of petty “neglect”. In one case it was not even the disqualified nurse who left the children alone, but his wife. Today, it was reported in the same journal that those affected were suing the Home Office.

It seems that not only are parents being punished for making “wrong” judgements on what was safe for their own children, with no adverse consequences, but that these punishments are having far-reaching consequences and were forcing them out of professions they had worked in for years and for which they had exemplary records. As the original BBC news article notes, there is actually no minimum age for babysitting, although the child remains the parent’s responsibility if the person left alone with them is under 16. In other words, people are being punished when they have not broken any law; the law is being made up by the people issuing the punishment. “Neglect” looks bad on any record, after all; it can mean anything up to leaving a baby sitting in a filthy nappy for days, or having people round regularly who were known to be violent, or leaving children alone and uncared-for while going on holiday.

The article also links to a Mumsnet discussion page in which a number of participants reported that they were looking after multiple children, sometimes for money, when they were 14 or younger. This was, I recall, normal when I was growing up (80s and 90s, everyone) and although there were some who might not have been suitable, or willing, to babysit (like me), plenty of teenagers, particularly girls, were. Of course, teenagers can also be parents themselves; are they to be deemed unsuitable to be left alone with their own children (usually babies, not toddlers)? Why a teenage parent and not a teenage sibling?

Quite apart from the injustice of people being punished for breaking some official’s ridiculous made-up “law”, there is the matter of how the police came to know about the mother’s “neglect” in the first place. Of course, someone told them, because of course the police are watching when you go out of your house to the shops, aren’t they? When did we become such a nation of snoops and busybodies that some of us will call the police when a mother leaves two children together for half an hour, and the police will take such a petty complaint seriously (rather than telling the caller, “call us if she’s not back in an hour or so”)? Recent government advertising campaigns advertising call-free hotlines so we might “rat on a rat”, meaning inform on people we suspect of claiming benefits they are not entitled to, encourage this culture of snitching and spying on neighbours over things that are really none of our business, and of being suspicious of our neighbours.

Surely parents should be trusted to make small decisions on what is safe or not for their own children, and what level of responsibility their older children have reached, and if not, the laws should be made clear, not left to police to make up as they go along. Nobody should be losing their job over a private decision that someone in authority disagreed with but which had no adverse consequences.

The article (extracted from Chua’s book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”) was published in the Wall Street Journal, and an interview with her was published in yesterday’s Guardian, in the Family supplement. It actually reveals that one of her daughters actually rebelled (in public), leading to Chua back-pedalling on some aspects of her parenting methods.

The article made me smell a rat from the beginning, actually. Where are all these Chinese math whizzes and musical prodigies? I’m sure they exist, but they exist in other ethnicities as well. It’s no secret that the Chinese minority in this country has among the best academic results, but the idea that they always get A’s is ridiculous. After all, if it was that easy to get an A, then not every A would be an A. And there is the small fact that there are plenty of Chinese in Europe doing menial jobs, or running restaurants (OK, it’s a skill, but you don’t need to be an academic to run or work in a restaurant). Go to any Chinatown and you won’t find lots of Chinese playing violin concertos, you’ll see them selling food. And if you value playing a musical instrument, why must it be the piano or violin, rather than the cello or the oboe? You can’t have an orchestra only composed of pianists and violinists.

Other writers in the WSJ (including parents and children who were brought up by Chinese immigrant parents) have pulled apart Chua’s arguments better than I can. Hanna Rosin, in an article on WSJ titled Mother Inferior, counters that although people hothoused to master an instrument may achieve technical mastery, that doesn’t mean they will learn to enjoy listening to music — even the Chua women, she says, “rarely express pure love of music; instead they express joy at having mastered it”; one friend who had been raised similarly to the Chua daughters (albeit by German parents) came to hate classical music and has not picked up a violin in a decade. Another mother notes that her dyslexic daughter put herself a punishing programme so as to learn to read, against her parents’ advice, so Chua’s thesis that nothing is fun until you can do it, and kids will not learn on their own initiative but only because of parental bullying, is shown to be groundless.

Then there are the other issues, such as what exactly is wrong with kids staying the night with a friend, or having one over to play? I didn’t have sleepovers, as far as I can remember, as a kid (I hated staying at other people’s houses, even my aunt’s) but my sister did, and it didn’t do her (or her friends) any harm. There can be some embarrassments such as if they wet the bed, but as long as it doesn’t stop them doing things they actually need to do (it’s actually possible to make friends with your kids’ parents, you know, such that you can arrange that they will do their homework there), I fail to see why it’s something to be avoided altogether. Kids have to have fun, rather than spending every waking moment learning to do something they will never particularly enjoy.

(Image source)

His first target was a girls’ secondary school in Leicester, which is run by the Leicester Jamia mosque which also runs the Darul Iftaa website. Among the shock-horror things he finds at this school is that the niqaab is a compulsory part of the uniform from age 11. Unusual, but not illegal. He finds the content of the Darul Iftaa site to be “pretty hardline”, among them that women should stay in their homes unless it is necessary, that Muslim lawyers should not help Muslims fleeing Shari’ah punishments to get asylum, and that music is a “direct ploy by the non-Muslims”, to which Ware adds “to undermine Islam” (which is not in the original). I would not concur that music is any sort of ploy or conspiracy; it is a normal part of western culture (and pretty much every other culture, actually) and the purpose of it is largely for some people to enjoy themselves and others to make money. However, the impermissibility of musical instruments is a mainstream position in Muslim law, and if there is a punishment in a Sacred Law, it should follow that helping people evade it is also unlawful, and similar provisions exist in non-sacred laws, actually. None of this consitutes extremism, even if some might find it distasteful.

He mentions that the website uses the term “kuffar”, which it does on six out of several hundred pages, almost always in the context of “imitating the kuffar” in clothing and hairstyle. In this, the website contradicts itself, on one page telling women that they should not style their hair in a manner that resembles non-Muslim women’s hair, but on another saying that it refers to dress deliberately intended to resemble non-Muslims or which is particular to other religions. In none of them is the word used in a derogatory fashion; rather, it is used in its correct Arabic form to mean non-believers, as the verb “kafara” in Arabic means not to believe something, which in itself carries no moral judgement. Ware then interviews Usama Hasan who alleges that the term “kuffar” as used in the Qur’an refers to people who were persecuting Muslims, as if any other use was to take it out of context. He clearly has a very limited knowledge of the Arabic language, because although some of those who did not believe in Islam at the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) persecuted the Muslims, not all did, and the classical Arabic textbooks of Islamic law invariably identify non-Muslims collectively using the term kuffar.

He then criticised an Ofsted report for saying that the school taught girls to “appreciate diversity” while the fatwa bank linked to it supposedly did the opposite, but Ofsted would have noticed what was being taught in the school and if such material was in the school’s textbooks, they surely would have noticed. The programme then runs through a selection of statements culled from various Islamic schools, among them “Our children are being exposed to a culture that is in opposition to everything Islam stands for”, as if this was a condemnation of the whole of western culture, when it most likely refers to the excesses of popular culture. He quotes a statement that “birthdays … are all practices of disbelievers and immoral people”, as if this came from a site linked to a school; it actually comes from Darul Ifta Birmingham, whose website gives no indication of any link to a school. (However, the bit about “disbelievers and immoral people has very recently been removed from the article — it is available in the Google cache as I write — here is a screenshot — but not on the existing page.) Following these statements, there is a sequence of images with a backing that includes the sound of gunfire, when none of the statements he quoted have any reference to violence.

He then attacks Shaikh Riyadh-ul-Haq, an imam in Birmingham trained at the Dar-ul-Uloom in Bury, Lancashire, showing him making various speeches, one of them apparently condemning western wars as “terrorism” and a “crusade” (GW Bush’s own word), giving a speech in which he relates two verses of the opening chapter of the Qur’an (referring to those on whose Allah’s wrath descended, and those who went astray, as referring respectively to Jews and Christians — the standard scholarly interpretation, in fact), and telling listeners not to “befriend the kuffar” and “align yourselves with the kuffar”, the last phrase indicating that this refers to allegiance rather than to personal friendships or to any command to hate non-Muslims. Ware demanded to know why the Tooting Islamic Centre (known locally as Bank of Baroda, which shares the building, to distinguish it from another nearby mosque in a side street) had allowed him to address Friday prayers while the students at the school associated with the mosque would be in attendance; the school, rather than just telling him to clear off, made excuses that the mosque was not the same as the school (even though they share the same building and several of the same trustees) and that he had not said anything inflammatory in front of the children.

Why would a mosque invite Shaikh Riyadh-ul-Haq to address Friday prayers anyway? The reason is that, however distasteful Ware may find some of his views, he is one of the most sought-after speakers in the Deobandi community throughout the UK; he is a “household name” and most of the children who heard him speak would have heard his lectures on tape or attended a few of them. While I do not personally like his manner of lecturing, there is a lot of useful content, including powerful defences of traditional Islamic belief and law and some of his harsher lectures (such as “The Status of the Hijaab”) have been withdrawn over the years. Ware is then shown interviewing Michael Gove and suggests that “it is a free country, we believe in free speech; I mean, you can’t really do anything to stop schools inviting people like Riyadh-ul-Haq if they want to, can you?” Gove responds, “You’re absolutely right, but it seems to me that anyone who’s running a school has a responsibility and a duty to ensure that they don’t allow that school to be linked with those who have extremist or anti-integrationist views”.

The problem here is that, if freedom does not include the right to tell people things they (or others who might be listening) do not want to hear, it means absolutely nothing. There is a big difference between “extremist” views, which might include encouraging Muslims to hate non-Muslims, and “anti-integrationist” ones which might encourage Muslims to socialise and marry among themselves, which might not sound ideal to some people, but is not necessarily a recipe for mistrust, let alone violence. In my experience, the Deobandi communities (particularly in London) are much better integrated than some of the strictly orthodox Jewish ones, which do not come in for anything like this level of scrutiny and there has been no violence there (except some directed at the Jews by various racists, and this has also been part of the recent Muslim experience). This is less true of Muslim communities in other parts of the UK, but they still meet others at work.

Ware then quotes a statement from the al-Risaala school trust’s management that says that their schools (in Tooting and Balham) are “fully committed to community cohesion”, and opines, “the dangers of not being committed are profound”, cutting to footage of the Oldham riots in 2001. Ware interviewed Prof. Ted Cantle, author of the report into the riots which concluded that they were caused by segregation of Asians from whites, not only in where they lived but in where they worked and went to school and with whom they socialised. However, the segregated schools for Asians were not faith schools at all, but simply run-down state comprehensives which happened to be located in a predominantly Asian area. What is to say that the young men who rioted were mosque regulars? It is well-known that there is a criminal class among Asians in many parts of the UK who reguarly appear in the news as drug dealers or pimps (as with this story in today’s BBC news). If they have been listening to Shaikh Riyadh-ul-Haq, it is unlikely that he has had much impact on them. I would add that many white, middle-class (non-Muslim) parents would not even think of sending their own children to some of the white-dominated schools in those towns, so it is a bit hypocritical for Ware to demand their integration with any other group.

He visited one school which had been 100% Asian in 2001, but was now “only” 89% Asian, with a headmaster who had grown up under Apartheid in South Africa, who claimed that he saw “similar patterns of residential segregation” in northern England. He said that “it would be a real shame if we were to sink into a voluntary form of Apartheid”. However, Apartheid and segregation refer to legally enforced regimes of separation in which a dominant racial group excludes others and pens them in (usually to inferior or even slummy housing) by law. None of that has ever happened in the UK and there is no danger of it happening, so the use of these terms to describe separate communities of working-class whites and Asians in some northern towns is irresponsible scaremongering. It is impossible to “sleepwalk into segregation” or “sink into voluntary Apartheid”. Both are imposed from above, and northern England is not northern Ireland, let alone South Africa or 1950s Mississippi. It was not faith schools that brought about any of these realities; it was politics and racism.

He then criticises the Bridge Schools Inspectorate (BSI), an organisation of Muslims and evangelical Christians which inspects some faith schools (but not all, excluding for example the aforementioned al-Furqan in Birmingham), and gave an “outstanding” rating, in most respects, to a school called Apex Islamic School in Ilford. Ware then accused him of “giving a platform” to Haitham al-Haddad, who had given a “provocative” speech which included the words, “… always say that the conflict between Islam and the enemies of al-Islam is an ongoing conflict, and we should pay the price of this victory from our blood, and Muslims are ready to do so”. The beginning part of this sentence was not included in the clip, so we are left unaware of who always says or say this. Further investigation reveals that he was talking about the people of Gaza who fought with Hamas, so he was not encouraging, for example, British Muslims to go and fight, let alone launch a fight here, and no doubt he talks about many other topics in his sermons at al-Muntada in Fulham besides jihad and Palestine, and might find more appropriate matter for a school fund-raising dinner — which was his connection to the Apex school — than this. The BSI responded that it was not in their remit to vet speakers at a school’s fundraising dinners and that it was bizarre to suggest otherwise. It is also no right of Ware or his friends at Policy Exchange, one of whom he interviewed in regard to Haitham al-Haddad, to dictate who a school should be “linked” with. They have a responsibility not to promote hate or violence, and as long as children are not being exposed to such material during school time, they have fulfilled their responsibility.

He then moves onto the issue of weekend and part-time Islamic schools which exist outside the inspection system altogether, in particular “one network” which runs over 40 clubs and schools teaching more than 5,000 schools, with Saudi connections. Panorama’s spy (supposedly a Saudi, claiming to be seeking books for his sister) approached one school in an un-named provincial town for textbooks and was told they were ordered according to how many students enrolled, and that the textbooks came from London. He found the source in west London, and found rooms with stacks and shelves of books, and was told his sister would have to study the whole book, which turned out to be the Saudi national curriculum. The spy, whose voice was disguised, alleged that the book (aimed at 12 to 13-year-olds) read that Jews looked like monkeys and pigs, which cannot possibly be true — there is a story in the Qur’an about one group of Jews who broke the Sabbath using trickery and were turned into said creatures, but that’s not the same thing.

The rest of the material contains harsh words about non-Muslims (probably no harsher than what evangelical Christians might say about Muslims, or even other Christians, however), and diagrams illustrating amputations of the hand for theft — hardly necessary to be taught to teenagers. However, this material is in Arabic, the students are almost certainly mostly Saudis whose parents intend to take them home, and one expects that some of those involved have diplomatic immunity, much as when they break sex discrimination laws. The British government has always been remarkably lenient to the Saudis due to the reliance of our arms industry on contracts with their government. Whatever the government does about what British Muslim schools teach British Muslim children, it is unlikely to interfere in this.

As Osama Saeed points out in his critique, Ware has previously accused the controller of BBC1 (on which Panorama appears) of being “as shallow as a paddling pool” and said she should stop “patronising BBC1 viewers by assuming that a range of bolder subjects hold no interest for them”. As I have pointed out before, Panorama usually lasts only 30 minutes and in that amount of time, you cannot do much investigation, and you often end up with a shallow and sentimental human interest story like this one ([1], [2]), which fails to ask important question about such matters as the abuse and poor treatment of the person who was the subject of the programme (but I’ve done that, so paid, professional journalists like Jeremy Vine didn’t have to); but on this subject, they can appear to be doing “serious investigation” by employing a spy who then presents his findings incorrectly or dishonestly and getting briefings from a Tory think tank (Policy Exchange), and when they find no evidence whatsoever that Muslim schools are really “preaching hate” (possibly because they did not look, possibly because the schools — quite rightfully — refuse to let them in), they look for the “connections” and give them as evidence, regardless of how relevant, or otherwise, they are. Osama also makes the point that there are serious problems with the state of some Muslim schools and madrassas which were not even discussed in the programme, which went all out for sensationalism — again, par for the course with the 30-minute Panorama.